@Klaas I guess it’s all a matter of the perspective you brought with you as you got introduced to Obsidian.
I’d never heard of Roam and came across Obsidian first after having read the book How to Take Smart Notes which lead me from the zettelkasten forum straight here. So when looking through such glasses, the concept of block referencing sounds like a shortcut that could end up hurting your thinking (what @ryanjamurphy alluded to above).
But seems a lot of people arrived on Obsidian after first having used Roam. I can symphatize that from such different perspective a user had gotten used to a feature which makes it feel like Obsidian is missing something here.
From what I gather, Obsidian was conceived in this thread on the Dynalist forum so the developers were very aware what Roam could(n’t) do and decided to make their own interpretation instead of a 1-1 clone.